Contentions

Obama’s Syrian engagement policy is in shambles. The decision to return our ambassador to Damascus has earned us the contempt of Bashar al-Assad and has done nothing to halt his embrace of Iran. We’ve now seen that Assad has upped the ante with the transfer of scud missiles to Hezbollah. This report suggests that the Obami then went a step further in the appeasement dance — calling off an Israeli attack:

Although US officials contacted by The National could not completely confirm that such [missile] technology had been transferred to Hizbollah by Syria, one official privy to intelligence briefings confirmed a story previously reported in the Israeli press that in the weeks before Senator John Kerry’s visit to Damascus on April 1, Israel almost bombed what it claimed was a convoy of advanced weaponry headed from Syrian military bases to Hizbollah along the shared border with Lebanon.

“I can’t promise you that planes were actually in the air, but it was close, very close,” said the official. “The White House had to talk them down from the attack and promised that Kerry would use strong language” with the Syrian president, Bashar Assad.

When asked about the outcome of the meeting between Mr Kerry and Mr Assad on the issue, the source tartly responded: “In light of where we are now, what do you think?”

Besides increasing the possibility of violence along one of the world’s most tense borders, the claim of new weapons transfers had also had a debilitating effect on supporters of Syrian engagement in Washington and might be responsible for a “hold” put on the February nomination of Robert Ford as the US ambassador to Syria.

So what did we gain by waving off the Israelis? Another dollop of contempt. We have conveyed — both to Syria and its Iranian partner — that we will not respond to provocation and, in fact, will restrain Israel from doing so. In a neat package we have all the elements of Obama’s foolish and dangerous Middle East policy — ingratiation with despots, unilateral gestures, the failure to project American power, and the collapse of the U.S.-Israel alliance that has acted as a successful deterrent for decades. A more complete picture of failure would be hard to paint. Are we realpolitiking yet?